Review: GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS at The Old Vic

Set in Chicago, this production’s all-female cast demonstrate with assuredness that men don’t have a monopoly on being jerks and yet without any noticeable script changes, the dialogue remains resolutely focussed on maleness, bravado, expletive-laden sales-speak and god-awful penis measuring among the cohort of desperate, grubby, self-congratulatory and ultra-competitive real estate salesmen.

We open at a Chinese restaurant where veteran Levene played by Indira Varma is trying with minimal success, to develop rapport and curry favour with the young officer manager Williamson (Dorothea Myer-Bennett) in the hopes of securing prime leads which can hopefully be converted into real estate sales and all-important commission. Desperation makes for dodgy dealing and amidst the power dynamics there is a very real sense that there has been a changing of the guard.

With black-outs signalling the end to each segment in director Patrick Marber’s production here presented in-the-round, the cast speculate, pontificate and wheedle with each other and their timorous clients while surrounded and observed on all sides. Disenchantment leads to the hatching of plots and a robbery is planned, but who benefits and who will carry the can? 

The assertive and deliberately overlapping dialogue emphasises that in the realm of sales, he who tawks loudest and longest, wins. The ugly and combative exchanges were the main contributor to the play’s Pulitzer Prize win after its 1984 run at the National Theatre and subsequent Broadway transfer. This opening represents a reversal of that sequence, but the all-female novelty casting here, is a departure from Marber’s Broadway version which last year starred Bob Odenkirk and Kieran Cullen in a more traditional staging.

Ultimately the play demonstrates that it is those which shut-up and listen who gain the upper hand, and it is here that the ambiguous sex of the characters lends a modicum of weight to the experiment. In the main however, I found too many jarring incongruities to make it plausible. Varma’s seething Levene is a pressure cooker — by turns obsequious and triumphant. She imbues him with real maleness which occasionally reminded me of Peter Falk’s Colombo. In other scenes Rosa Salazar as Roma, sports a leather jacket, shades and a ponytail, pervading a mix of Brooklyn cugine and smart talking hoodlum. In fact each cast member (Mercedes Bahleda, Nancy Crane, Niky Wardley and Florence Odumosu also appear in the production) acquits themself more than adequately, but the overall inconsistency in applying the gender swap left too many questions, the most fundamental of which must surely be, why on earth couldn’t this have simply been about a group of thoroughly unpleasant woman competing to sell real estate and be top dog (or top bitch)? It would have required script rewrites and the fine tuning of character names, but ultimately would have offered sense and clarity to Mamet’s wholly misogynistic, racist and fundamentally unpleasant play. The intentions behind this format, feel woolly and insufficiently considered, highlighting dialogue ambiguities and (perhaps counterintuitively) adding to the horribly dated feel.

GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS continues at the Old Vic until 18th July and plays 90mins straight through without interval.

Glengarry Glen Ross Tickets